I’ll be honest with you. Running a small independent newspaper in Siskiyou County is not a glamorous business. The deadlines don’t stop, the phone doesn’t stop, the bills don’t stop — and some weeks, neither does the doubt. Am I covering what matters? Am I being fair? Am I getting it right?
Over time I’ve found that the only antidote to that kind of pressure is stillness. Meditation. Reflection. Sitting with hard questions long enough to hear something useful come back. It’s made me a better publisher, I think, not because it gives me answers, but because it forces me to ask the right questions in the first place.
Here’s one of those questions: Why is one of the worst human rights atrocities on the planet being met with near-total silence by the American mainstream press?
I’m talking about forced organ harvesting in China — the state-sanctioned murder of prisoners of conscience by the Chinese Communist Party so their organs can be sold to paying transplant tourists. Not an allegation. Not a fringe theory. A documented, cross-examined, independently verified reality that has been building in the evidentiary record for more than two decades.
On April 7, The Heritage Foundation held an event titled “Organ Harvesting: Communist China’s Hideous Shop of Horrors.” The panel included Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ), one of the most persistent voices on human rights in Congress; investigative journalist Ethan Gutmann, a senior fellow at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation whose independent research predates and corroborates the work of others; and Jan Jekielek, senior editor of The Epoch Times and author of Killed to Order: China’s Organ Harvesting Industry and the True Nature of America’s Biggest Adversary — a book that debuted at #8 on the New York Times Best Sellers list in March.
Let me say that again: a New York Times bestseller, on a subject the New York Times has largely declined to cover in proportion to its gravity. Make of that what you will.
Jekielek’s central finding — corroborated by the China Tribunal, an independent UK-based body that examined the evidence — is that the CCP has built what amounts to an on-demand organ killing machine. When a foreign patient pays for a transplant, a prisoner of conscience — a Falun Gong practitioner, a Uyghur, a dissident — is matched in a database and executed to fulfill the order. “When deals were made,” Jekielek told the Heritage audience, “there was already someone in a database on the Chinese Communist Party side pre-matched, and that person can be killed to order, on demand.”
The victims are not random. They are disproportionately people whose spiritual or religious practices — meditation, prayer, moral self-cultivation — made them a political threat to a regime that cannot tolerate inner lives it doesn’t control.
That detail hits differently when you’ve spent any time in your own inner life.
Now, why is this a story for Siskiyou News? We’re a county paper. We cover road conditions and water rights and school board meetings and who got booked into the Siskiyou County Jail. Fair enough. But independent local journalism exists, in part, because the press at every other level has failed someone. And right now, the press at the national level is failing the victims of what the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank with no particular incentive to overstate it, is calling a crime that echoes Nuremberg.
I am not naive about the sourcing landscape here. The Epoch Times has a perspective, and readers should know that. But Jekielek’s book draws on decades of independent investigations. Gutmann’s research is his own. The China Tribunal was convened independently. The U.S. State Department’s human rights reports have acknowledged the practice. Rep. Smith has been raising this issue in Congress since well before it was fashionable in conservative circles or anywhere else. The evidentiary record is not thin.
What is thin is the coverage.
I’ve thought about why that is. Some of it is access — China is a closed state and sources are hard to protect. Some of it is economic entanglement — American corporations and media conglomerates have interests in the Chinese market they’d prefer not to jeopardize. Some of it, frankly, is that the story’s loudest early champions were organizations and some editors used an excuse not to do their own verification. That’s lazy. And in this case, it may be complicit.
The point I am making is that some editors use early coverage by certain outlets as an excuse not to verify stories themselves which I think is a lapse in journalistic responsibility.
Silence is also a choice. And choices have consequences.
This news outlet is going to keep covering this story — legislative initiatives, new research, and any further developments from the Heritage event and Jekielek’s ongoing work. Not because we have a political agenda, but because we believe that a press that only covers the comfortable is not a press at all.
The stillness I find in reflection has taught me that the hardest questions are usually the ones most worth asking. This one qualifies.
J.A. Martin is the publisher of Siskiyou News, an independent print and digital publication serving Siskiyou County, and beyond in California.
